Beauty
by Valdrada
Summary: Shaun can save himself from his static nostalgia, but a certain Subject is needed, as well as a verb. Desmond/Shaun


Beauty

"Absence makes the heart grow fonder." –Proverb

Shaun had found himself in a state of sexual perplexity since, well, high school. Often in snatches that ran through his head like memorized bible verse, he was hit with shame, not shame attached to his current state of being, but residual shame, ebbing out of what he, back then, had been conditioned to feel about the so-called flagrancy of his affections. Certainly, the fifteen-year-old him would muse, _I am hell-bent on an infernal reaping of my soul._ Pencil perpetually in a free-fall off his desk, he watched her, entranced, at the sway of her skirt as she paced the room, knit sweater accentuating her torso. Her eyes were pinched at the corners like course fingers holding a spear leaf, and she would impart a wan smile, chalk-coated fingers idly brushing the corners of the desks as she passed down the aisles. This, in accordance with the nakedness of the room, the clinical feel that made his chest heavy with chill, made him hard, daily. It was a nuisance, especially undergoing the sensuous musicality of Keats and Wordsworth on top of that, making everything exceptionally surreal for him, and his answers when she called on him were flighty, tongued with the heart, as she would put it, her agog commentary feeding off his very own.

These vivid remembrances take their toll, take more out of him, then say, the supposed rapport between him and a certain Desmond Miles as of late. It had seemed numbingly simple at first, enacting on the first twinge of lust, almost sophomoric, in that just-as-naked warehouse. It was just at foolish, at the time, just as clumsy and, in the long run, unplanned. He was overwhelmed with the cooler climate, the hush, the high-rise ceilings steeped in shadow. It was shame like barb wire, shame, lust, and a foolhardy gumption that was almost contracted through the _infamous _Subject Seventeen, through babysitting him constantly, or in this case, blindly meeting, both of them restlessly stretching their legs and finding themselves caught in an eddy, suspended in the wide, open space of grey.

And the open space irritated Shaun. It prompted him further. The disconnect, among the digs, the surgical hostility, the precisely manicured insults, the flick of his wrist to dismiss Desmond like some pesky fly, was starting to get him hard. It was with a startling inversion, the day his heart beat in sync with his temple, that his rational mind fled. The flightiness returned. His teacher would have been proud, the way his tongue spoke for his heart.

Upon entering the warehouse, he spotted Desmond standing with his back pressed against the walls, eyes pulled upward as if by theatrical strings, making him look plain sad and loony. If anything, his eyes were fossilized leaves, petrified chunks of rock and dirt and refuse. Shaun, expression dark, hands shoved in pockets, had reeled right up to Desmond, lips jaggedly parted like a fissure worked into the surface on an airless, unpopulated planet. Overcrowding Desmond's initial surprise, though, was the man swaying forwards and backwards at the moment he halted, eyes dipped low, and Desmond, usually inquisitive, was empty of words. In a fit of retaliation, meaninglessly grasping for familiarity, he blurted, "What's up with you?" Reflexively half-scowling, then, suddenly depleted of nothing but a pleading crease in his face, Shaun planted his hands on either side of Desmond, leaned into him like he was gingerly lowering himself into a tub of scalding water. Their lips brushed. Shaun's teeth clicked as he drew back. Desmond, rigid with latent rejection, felt as if a nail had been driven into his abdomen, pining him to the wall.

Rather than fulfilling the urge to shift, dig, and analyze, Shaun had been staying his impulses, his yowling yearning. He was holding out, like a pious man, in order for the eventual plunge into the excavation site to be gloriously gut-pleasing. He anticipated, when it came down to it, he would do so carelessly, brimming with some exclusively indulgent intent. Desmond was just an artifact to him, something that he would keep locked away in a drawer like a coin collection or a bust of Nefertiti, just a vague pulse at the back of his mind, more desirable, it seemed, in it's concealment, it's preservation. It was this mode of occupying his mind in the doldrums of the days overlapping like shed leaves in autumn, the thrill of this ever precisely executed vacillation between fast and feast that reconstructed Desmond into this figure with significant centrifugal pull. Desmond remained as unaware as ever as Shaun projected a world around him that superimposed the banality, made his quiet times pensive and the times he scoured the screens and notes before him, brow set, lip inclined to perspire, done with the affectation of a general overseeing a tedious battle. In this way, when Shaun was offish or abrasively forward to Desmond, he was, quite zealously, pursuing.

In the warehouse a new order was established, their membranes reformed. At first, there was Desmond, receding more and more into the wall, and Shaun pulsating above him, glasses glaring, legs giving. Time held its breath, a curse, no doubt, a sentencing. Nothing seemed feasible enough for there to be a legitimate lapse forward. Desmond, catching Shaun's eye, saw something like a fortress of artillery in there, and with heavy-handed clarity he knew this was it. This was all it was.

Desmond eventually reciprocated the kiss, but only until he deemed the deliberate derailment too much too soon. He was already too scattered, and an extra brush against the other man's lips, a nip, was enough to make his mark, after he pushed back, laughing maniacally, voicing, "I'm not. I'm just not now," laughing again at his soon-to-be-crucified exaltation. Shaun was practically immovable, though, his tongue dried up in his mouth, his thought-process immersed in something other-worldly, and before he could snap back, before he could rectify his reputable sarcasm and taunt, Desmond slipped away, still sporting a lofty chortle, his insides deliberating mutiny in the meanwhile. Shaun looked deep into the grey wall before him, uttered, as in nonchalance, as in agreement with some unseen entity "Well, fuck." Later, as he worked and Desmond was tucked away into the Animus, he would perspire more than usual and would shun caffeine for two days, welcoming any malicious headache to plague him as a point of distraction.

As the crew became more and more pressed for time and Desmond was exposed to the Animus in larger doses, the negative impacts became more apparent. For Shaun, he noticed this most in the moments where the man rose from the machine, slowly, like he was being made to breaststroke through quicksand. Every time Desmond surfaced he looked more haggard than the last time, more shell-shocked. It was becoming harder to rouse him, like trying with all manner of limbs to pry open a wooden door that was swollen by humid weather. Gaze amiss, Shaun would abandon his computer screens to focus on Desmond being escorted to a cot in the back by Lucy, the woman's face bloodless, hands the same pallor. Desmond would reveal in his surroundings, from time to time adopting a pained expression that spliced Shaun's insides, despite his constant denial, digging his nails into his thigh to mask the feeling. With a succession of scowling he'd down his cold coffee, breath and his fingers pounding the keyboard emphasizing his cardiac distress. To his chagrin, this alerted the ever-receptive Rebecca, who flicked her eyes now and again at him curiously, eyebrows narrowed. She never approached him about it, though, as if seeing him this way was worth being in the dark about it. Whatever it was, the distance was what made it fine with him.

It was impossible to know how to move forward. There was no moving anywhere, or at least it felt that way, like the Animus was a portal into extended life while the two women and himself were suspended in this bog of unorganized paperwork, nonsense! The confounding look that etched Desmond's face whenever he was parted from the Animus was evidence enough. Shaun didn't blame him. To immerse oneself in history, to stretch oneself taut against a timeline, was some romantic ideation of Shaun's, irresistible. He was removed for a moment, borne a million miles back by the thought of his teacher's hand arcing towards him, skirts rustling in the background, smoothing his shoulder, her smile coursing down her arm. Once, while dozing off, head bowed, palms turning up, he felt the same sensation dripping on both shoulders, a sopping warmth that eventually spread through him. He did not know how he knew this to be the _infamous _assassin, he who was certainly not a trailblazer but just as damn ordinary as any strapped-down weasel. Even as he fully wakened, tensed, he did not shake him off. He lifted two fingers and then lowered them. He shut his eyes. He heard in his head a muffled string of words from far off and his jaw muscles itched, wanted to recite along.

The tentative and parenthetical touching eventually led to full contact, statements. Often more wordless than not they would confer, pressing into each other, jostling each other's bones to free some trapped noise, some answer that only the other could give if analyzed with such shattering blows. But Desmond, by the end, would sit or lie back, wherever they happened to be, sighing, and Shaun would hunch over, clasp his hands, and fume. Nothing ever came of it. It was barely plot-driven but it kept Shaun's insides wailing, demanding more of it.

When at his lowest point, driven mad by want and by compulsions to flee, he approached Desmond, the man at the time toiling in the same state but by different means. He was behind some boxes in the warehouse, lying on his side, hood over his eyes, knees thrust forward, cradling his arms to his chest. Shaun did not ever once see the facial expression he wore but he detected a quiver enveloping him, a pulse that wasn't his. He stopped short in his initial haste and stared. There was a twinge of gallantry in his decision making process but it was mostly deluded by greed.

Shaun stretched out on the floor alongside Desmond, the pulse doubling now, feeding through to him. With his hand pressed firmly on the other man's shoulder, he dipped his head down, and recited, with rapt assertiveness and lips that were barely jogged from their tight shape:

"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing."

After he was finished, Desmond pressed back against him, sighed, and Shaun could hear the dark note there unfurling a stygian finger to the sky. And then, like something had caught in the recesses of his throat, Subject Seventeen shook with spasms, and laughed.

It filled the entirety of the room and then snuffed it.

**Author's Notes:** The excerpt that Shaun recites is from an epic poem by John Keats entitled, "Endymion." Also, just thought I would point out machines can't love, but Shaun can make it work, people.


End file.
